This paper is concerned with convergence of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum terms in the nonconvex setting. A class of stochastic momentum methods, including stochastic gradient descent, heavy ball, and Nesterov's accelerated gradient, is analyzed in a general framework under mild assumptions. Based on the convergence result of expected gradients, we prove the almost sure convergence by a detailed discussion of the effects of momentum and the number of upcrossings. It is worth noting that there are not additional restrictions imposed on the objective function and stepsize. Another improvement over previous results is that the existing Lipschitz condition of the gradient is relaxed into the condition of Holder continuity. As a byproduct, we apply a localization procedure to extend our results to stochastic stepsizes.
When a physical system is modeled by a nonlinear function, the unknown parameters can be estimated by fitting experimental observations by a least-squares approach. Newton's method and its variants are often used to solve problems of this type. In this paper, we are concerned with the computation of the minimal-norm solution of an underdetermined nonlinear least-squares problem. We present a Gauss-Newton type method, which relies on two relaxation parameters to ensure convergence, and which incorporates a procedure to dynamically estimate the two parameters, as well as the rank of the Jacobian matrix, along the iterations. Numerical results are presented.
Assessing the similarity of two images is a complex task that has attracted significant efforts in the image processing community. The widely used Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) addresses this problem by quantifying a perceptual structural similarity. In this paper we consider a recently introduced continuous SSIM (cSSIM), which allows one to analyze sequences of images of increasingly fine resolutions. We prove that this index includes the classical SSIM as a special case, and we provide a precise connection between image similarity measured by the cSSIM and by the $L_2$ norm. Using this connection, we derive bounds on the cSSIM by means of bounds on the $L_2$ error, and we even prove that the two error measures are equivalent in certain circumstances. We exploit these results to obtain precise rates of convergence with respect to the cSSIM for several concrete image interpolation methods, and we further validate these findings by many numerical experiments. This newly established connection paves the way to obtain novel insights into the features and limitations of the SSIM.
Recent theoretical studies proved that deep neural network (DNN) estimators obtained by minimizing empirical risk with a certain sparsity constraint can attain optimal convergence rates for regression and classification problems. However, the sparsity constraint requires to know certain properties of the true model, which are not available in practice. Moreover, computation is difficult due to the discrete nature of the sparsity constraint. In this paper, we propose a novel penalized estimation method for sparse DNNs, which resolves the aforementioned problems existing in the sparsity constraint. We establish an oracle inequality for the excess risk of the proposed sparse-penalized DNN estimator and derive convergence rates for several learning tasks. In particular, we prove that the sparse-penalized estimator can adaptively attain minimax convergence rates for various nonparametric regression problems. For computation, we develop an efficient gradient-based optimization algorithm that guarantees the monotonic reduction of the objective function.
Ill-posed linear inverse problems appear in many scientific setups, and are typically addressed by solving optimization problems, which are composed of data fidelity and prior terms. Recently, several works have considered a back-projection (BP) based fidelity term as an alternative to the common least squares (LS), and demonstrated excellent results for popular inverse problems. These works have also empirically shown that using the BP term, rather than the LS term, requires fewer iterations of optimization algorithms. In this paper, we examine the convergence rate of the projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithm for the BP objective. Our analysis allows to identify an inherent source for its faster convergence compared to using the LS objective, while making only mild assumptions. We also analyze the more general proximal gradient method under a relaxed contraction condition on the proximal mapping of the prior. This analysis further highlights the advantage of BP when the linear measurement operator is badly conditioned. Numerical experiments with both $\ell_1$-norm and GAN-based priors corroborate our theoretical results.
In this paper, we revisit the problem of Differentially Private Stochastic Convex Optimization (DP-SCO) and provide excess population risks for some special classes of functions that are faster than the previous results of general convex and strongly convex functions. In the first part of the paper, we study the case where the population risk function satisfies the Tysbakov Noise Condition (TNC) with some parameter $\theta>1$. Specifically, we first show that under some mild assumptions on the loss functions, there is an algorithm whose output could achieve an upper bound of $\tilde{O}((\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}+\frac{\sqrt{d\log \frac{1}{\delta}}}{n\epsilon})^\frac{\theta}{\theta-1})$ for $(\epsilon, \delta)$-DP when $\theta\geq 2$, here $n$ is the sample size and $d$ is the dimension of the space. Then we address the inefficiency issue, improve the upper bounds by $\text{Poly}(\log n)$ factors and extend to the case where $\theta\geq \bar{\theta}>1$ for some known $\bar{\theta}$. Next we show that the excess population risk of population functions satisfying TNC with parameter $\theta>1$ is always lower bounded by $\Omega((\frac{d}{n\epsilon})^\frac{\theta}{\theta-1}) $ and $\Omega((\frac{\sqrt{d\log \frac{1}{\delta}}}{n\epsilon})^\frac{\theta}{\theta-1})$ for $\epsilon$-DP and $(\epsilon, \delta)$-DP, respectively. In the second part, we focus on a special case where the population risk function is strongly convex. Unlike the previous studies, here we assume the loss function is {\em non-negative} and {\em the optimal value of population risk is sufficiently small}. With these additional assumptions, we propose a new method whose output could achieve an upper bound of $O(\frac{d\log\frac{1}{\delta}}{n^2\epsilon^2}+\frac{1}{n^{\tau}})$ for any $\tau\geq 1$ in $(\epsilon,\delta)$-DP model if the sample size $n$ is sufficiently large.
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a promising method for solving large-scale inverse problems, due to its excellent scalability with respect to data size. The current mathematical theory in the lens of regularization theory predicts that SGD with a polynomially decaying stepsize schedule may suffer from an undesirable saturation phenomenon, i.e., the convergence rate does not further improve with the solution regularity index when it is beyond a certain range. In this work, we present a refined convergence rate analysis of SGD, and prove that saturation actually does not occur if the initial stepsize of the schedule is sufficiently small. Several numerical experiments are provided to complement the analysis.
In distributed optimization problems, a technique called gradient coding, which involves replicating data points, has been used to mitigate the effect of straggling machines. Recent work has studied approximate gradient coding, which concerns coding schemes where the replication factor of the data is too low to recover the full gradient exactly. Our work is motivated by the challenge of creating approximate gradient coding schemes that simultaneously work well in both the adversarial and stochastic models. To that end, we introduce novel approximate gradient codes based on expander graphs, in which each machine receives exactly two blocks of data points. We analyze the decoding error both in the random and adversarial straggler setting, when optimal decoding coefficients are used. We show that in the random setting, our schemes achieve an error to the gradient that decays exponentially in the replication factor. In the adversarial setting, the error is nearly a factor of two smaller than any existing code with similar performance in the random setting. We show convergence bounds both in the random and adversarial setting for gradient descent under standard assumptions using our codes. In the random setting, our convergence rate improves upon block-box bounds. In the adversarial setting, we show that gradient descent can converge down to a noise floor that scales linearly with the adversarial error to the gradient. We demonstrate empirically that our schemes achieve near-optimal error in the random setting and converge faster than algorithms which do not use the optimal decoding coefficients.
We study the problem of training deep neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activiation function using gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. In particular, we study the binary classification problem and show that for a broad family of loss functions, with proper random weight initialization, both gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent can find the global minima of the training loss for an over-parameterized deep ReLU network, under mild assumption on the training data. The key idea of our proof is that Gaussian random initialization followed by (stochastic) gradient descent produces a sequence of iterates that stay inside a small perturbation region centering around the initial weights, in which the empirical loss function of deep ReLU networks enjoys nice local curvature properties that ensure the global convergence of (stochastic) gradient descent. Our theoretical results shed light on understanding the optimization of deep learning, and pave the way to study the optimization dynamics of training modern deep neural networks.
Asynchronous distributed machine learning solutions have proven very effective so far, but always assuming perfectly functioning workers. In practice, some of the workers can however exhibit Byzantine behavior, caused by hardware failures, software bugs, corrupt data, or even malicious attacks. We introduce \emph{Kardam}, the first distributed asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm that copes with Byzantine workers. Kardam consists of two complementary components: a filtering and a dampening component. The first is scalar-based and ensures resilience against $\frac{1}{3}$ Byzantine workers. Essentially, this filter leverages the Lipschitzness of cost functions and acts as a self-stabilizer against Byzantine workers that would attempt to corrupt the progress of SGD. The dampening component bounds the convergence rate by adjusting to stale information through a generic gradient weighting scheme. We prove that Kardam guarantees almost sure convergence in the presence of asynchrony and Byzantine behavior, and we derive its convergence rate. We evaluate Kardam on the CIFAR-100 and EMNIST datasets and measure its overhead with respect to non Byzantine-resilient solutions. We empirically show that Kardam does not introduce additional noise to the learning procedure but does induce a slowdown (the cost of Byzantine resilience) that we both theoretically and empirically show to be less than $f/n$, where $f$ is the number of Byzantine failures tolerated and $n$ the total number of workers. Interestingly, we also empirically observe that the dampening component is interesting in its own right for it enables to build an SGD algorithm that outperforms alternative staleness-aware asynchronous competitors in environments with honest workers.
In this work, we consider the distributed optimization of non-smooth convex functions using a network of computing units. We investigate this problem under two regularity assumptions: (1) the Lipschitz continuity of the global objective function, and (2) the Lipschitz continuity of local individual functions. Under the local regularity assumption, we provide the first optimal first-order decentralized algorithm called multi-step primal-dual (MSPD) and its corresponding optimal convergence rate. A notable aspect of this result is that, for non-smooth functions, while the dominant term of the error is in $O(1/\sqrt{t})$, the structure of the communication network only impacts a second-order term in $O(1/t)$, where $t$ is time. In other words, the error due to limits in communication resources decreases at a fast rate even in the case of non-strongly-convex objective functions. Under the global regularity assumption, we provide a simple yet efficient algorithm called distributed randomized smoothing (DRS) based on a local smoothing of the objective function, and show that DRS is within a $d^{1/4}$ multiplicative factor of the optimal convergence rate, where $d$ is the underlying dimension.